2010-04-04

A popular way to customize emacs is changing its color scheme, as already
discussed color theming. Until recently, I was using an evolved version of the
color theme presented there, 'djcb-dark'. It works for me but, admittedly,
it's a bit ugly.

But recently, in a post to the Wanderlust mailing list, someone mentioned a
color theme called Zenburn. Zenburn started its life as a color scheme for
vim, around 2002. The explicit goal was to have a pleasant theme that is
light on the eyes, and allows you to stay 'in the zone' for long stretches of
time. People liked it, and version for many other programs were made,
including emacs.

I've been using Zenburn for the last few weeks, and I really like it. I used
to think that 'low-contrast' would mean that things are not really clear; but
the opposite seems true. Anyway, the screen shot says more than a thousand
words I suppose…

Zenburn-for-emacs (written by Daniel Brockman) can be found at the link
above. I've sent my updates to him of course, but as it may take a while for
the 'official' version to be updated, I've put my version on
Emacswiki: ZenburnColorTheme. The changes are the support for Wanderlust,
hi-line (for highlighting the current line) , magit and elscreen; also,
I made selected (eh, transiently marked regions) not loose their foreground
color.

Note, the theme is not yet part of the color-theme package, but does require
it.

@Bratsche-freude: hmmm... for me, the tooltips are quite visible (black on whitish-yellow). There is the 'tooltip' face for that, but zenburn does not touch that. Maybe you are starting from a theme that does, and makes it unreadable if you use zenburn after that?

I was having some problems making it work on Aquamacs so I wrote a version using the builtin custom-theme engine instead of color-theme. If anyone want to check it out it's on http://bitbucket.org/kcfelix/zenburn-theme.el

djcb, I don't use the packages your updates are for, but I'll incorporate them on my version as well if you don't mind.

hiI originally posted the zenburn theme to the wanderlust list. I switched back to mutt so I did not read the list any more, sorry.You merged the settings to the theme, so all probs to you!Your blog makes me want to dig deeper into it and perhaps give wanderlust another try :)Great blog, I love it.

I tried the zenburn.el found here: http://www.brockman.se/software/zenburn/zenburn.el. It absolutely doesn't look as supposed. It is similar to the emacs theme cheap goldenrod. I am using emacs 23.2 on a kubuntu 10.04 LTS. Have you put some custom-set-faces before adding zenburn staff?

Actually I found out what is the problem: it seems that the zenburn theme is not adapted to console mode. In deed, when calling emacs in window mode it behaves quite good but in no window mode it reverts to cheap goldenrod settings. Is there a way to fix and make it react the same in both modes?

I beg your pardon for offtopic but can you point me towards some description of start\restart\shutdown of emacs?

To be more precise I use emacs --daemon which autoloads everytime I logon to ubuntu.

There are obvious problems: I didn't managed to find a way to gracefully shutdown it upon logout - which leads to question about potential file conflicts on next logon (due to some garbage leftovers I presume).

@Anonymous, crosshairs has support for that already, by default the color should follow the hl-line color (see crosshairs-vline-same-face-flag) -- assuming you use hl-line-mode for highlighting the current line.

I really like the theme, but ended up having problems when using it on the latest emacs 24 build via git. I found that when I did a (load-theme 'zenburn) that some of the inherited styles were often misapplied. In the end, I found that following seemed to work reliably as the last stanza of my ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

;; Set color theme only if using a windowing system and emacs 24 or higher.(when (and (window-system) (>= emacs-major-version 24)) (add-to-list 'custom-theme-load-path "~/.emacs.d/themes/") (load-theme 'zenburn) ;; HACK: load-theme has issues, load the file as well (load-file "~/.emacs.d/themes/zenburn-theme.el"))